One of the defenses of the election of President Trump is that he’d learn on the job. So has he? Professor Rebecca Friedman Lissner of U.S. Naval War College, who studies Strategic and Operational Research, thinks not:
Although considerable variation characterizes this administration’s approach to decision making, learning should be apparent in across-the-board procedural improvements. Instead, President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria is a useful, recent test case that suggests the foreign policymaking process has, at minimum, not improved and may actually have grown less effective with time. Reportedly, the president “instinctively” elected to withdraw U.S. forces after a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which Erdogan signaled his intent to attack Kurdish forces in northern Syria near the Turkish border. The decision was not part of a formal policymaking process and ignored the recommendations of the Departments of Defense and State. In fact, it came as a surprise to the Pentagon, which indicates its disassociation from a meaningful interagency process and precluded carefully considered implementation. The abrupt withdrawal was rife with unintended consequences the president does not seem to have considered, from the liberation of Islamic State prisoners to the complication of an ultimately successful mission against Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and diplomatic fallout from the abandonment of the United States’s Kurdish partners. Its suddenness echoes earlier presidential decisions about Syria, most notably Trump’s surprise order to withdraw 2,000 U.S. troops in December 2018—which the president later partially reversed, but not before the resignation of Secretary Mattis in protest. In a further procedural parallelism, the president seems to now support a new plan that leaves approximately 200 U.S. troops in eastern Syria to guard local oil fields. [Lawfare]
I found her use of the instinctively interesting. In the evolutionary context, we do well with off-the-cuff decisions when they regard situations which we’ve faced many times before as a species. It should be obvious that making complex decisions regarding whether or not troops should be stationed in the Middle East on an instinctive basis is simple madness.
Perhaps most critically, the president’s personality is simply not amenable to learning. Research in cognitive psychology indicates that individuals tend to be better learners when they are open to environmental feedback, change their beliefs readily and receive discrepant information open-mindedly. Yet first-person accounts of those who have worked with the president, at-a-distance psychological assessments, and observation of President Trump’s public rhetoric and behavior all indicate that the president indexes poorly on each of these dimensions.
I would simply say that the President is a narcissist who cannot, in his own mind, be wrong. Since improvement implies failure, in his mind, we won’t see failure.
In fact, learning on the job was the expectation of people who didn’t understand the inferior nature of Donald J. Trump.
